


From Ashes to Honey

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: 1000-5000 Words, Angst, Character Study, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Episode: s10e09 The Company of Thieves, F/M, Season/Series 10, community: sd_ficathon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-24
Updated: 2007-05-24
Packaged: 2017-10-03 01:24:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's never understood how she manages her pain. He has some sense of how Teal'c weaves his suffering into his strength; Teal'c's losses are the reinforcing strands threaded through the strapping tape that makes him nearly impossible to snap. He has some sense of how Jack steadfastly denies the battle, incorporating his pain as an integral part of his world. He even has some sense of how he resists his own suffering, makes a crutch of that resistance. Pain is his prop, his cane; it'll be his walker and his wheelchair if he lives to get old. But he has no sense of what Sam does with hers.</p><p>A post-ep to 'The Company of Thieves.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	From Ashes to Honey

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Rowan Darkstar in the Sam and Daniel Ficathon. Prompts: 'Hurt/comfort, something happens to Sam on a mission that she's having trouble dealing with, and Daniel works his way through her defenses (UST or romance, either way).'
> 
> _From Honey to Ashes_ is the title of Volume 2 of Lévi-Strauss's _Mythologiques_.

> > The scientific mind does not so much provide the right answers as ask the right questions.
>> 
>>              Claude Lévi-Strauss, _Mythologiques_ Vol. 1

On _Odyssey_, on the return trip through hyperspace, he watches her.

It's sidelong, peripheral, corner-of-the-eye. While they eat in the mess, while they're walking down a corridor together ... while she's seated at a nearby console, eyes softly shadowed in the overhead illumination, the skin of her face and hands recast in porcelain by the confluence of screenglow and cool white task lighting. Over the years she's come to look almost frighteningly doll-like to him -- a shiny blush-dotted roundness high on her cheeks, a waxiness to her lips, a glassiness to her eyes no matter how warm and focused they seem. Makeup has never suited her, and she's always insisted on wearing it, and it's come to suit her less as time's gone by. He understands about hanging on to what makes you feel human. He also understands about masks. Hers goes deep below the surface of her skin.

Random connections keep sparking across his mind, to shapings, metamorphoses, the transubstantiation of matter -- the nymph Syrinx into sighing reed pipes, dust and clay into a golem, communion wine to blood, the touch of Midas, the glare of Medusa. He knows his brain is trying to model something to make sense of it. He knows it's failing.

He knows he's failed her, has been failing her, for a long time.

He heard something, like a suspicious creak in the night, and he's craning his neck, straining to see through the dark, straining to hear it again or see a slanting suggestion of shadow that will tell him where to start looking. He's failing to find it.

"Daniel? You OK?" she says, on the bridge, when they've dropped out of hyperspace and are watching Earth transform from a glinting speck of stellar dust into a mottled blue marble on the forward viewscreen. The words are so low that the team around them can't hear, not even Teal'c standing behind and between them.

He'd say _I'm fine_, but that's their shorthand for _I've had the crap kicked out of me but I'm functional and there's nothing you can do to help right now anyway_, and he hasn't had the crap kicked out of him. At least, not as recently as she has, as Teal'c has. He's aware of the irony of her asking him the question he's been wondering about her since the hyperdrive came back online. He knows she's asking because she's sensed that he's been acting funny. He knows that she doesn't want a real answer -- that when they ask each other, now, if they're OK, it's by rote. He knows the question doesn't mean _Are you OK?_ but _Why have you been acting funny?_, and he doesn't have an answer yet.

He chooses to ignore the question, to deflect it back at her, transmute it through the alchemy of rhetoric. He turns his head toward her and opens his mouth to say _Are you?_ \-- but then Vala, on his other side, elbows him in the ribs to pre-punctuate some cheerful wisecrack about celestial bodies, and Mitchell, on Sam's other side, claps a hand on her shoulder to tell her she done good, she got them home, and in the end they never answer or even look at each other, just keep their gazes fixed on home.

&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;

He's never understood how she manages her pain.

Emotional damage is an occupational hazard of the job. In that respect, as in others, all of them had ample prerequisites for their positions -- in the main, experience with the loss of family violently and far too young, but supplemented by a plethora of displacements, abandonments, career stress -- and all of them are constitutionally suited to that particular unique demand of their service: they're strong; they can survive repeated hits and keep getting up. "We take a lickin' and keep on tickin'," Jack would say, if they ever talked about this. But they don't; none of them ever talk about this. Not even Sam and him. Perhaps, odd though it might seem to an outsider, Sam and him least of all.

It seems odd to him now.

"Sam?" he says, in soft-gentle-boyish voice, standing in the doorway of her lab.

It takes her an extra half-second to look up, and _there_: in the lift and turn of her head he sees the same thing he heard in her voice on _Odyssey_, in that odd moment where all she was telling them was that she'd repaired the hyperdrive and long-range comms and messaged the base that they were coming home. Something had caught at his ear then, some wrongness in her voice -- a flatness he'd never heard before, an indefinable absence of warmth. The way she lifts her head and then turns it toward his voice isn't _I was lost in my work_ or _crap I wish you'd leave me alone but here you are I guess I have to deal with you_ or the disinterest or sluggish response time of exhaustion. It's something else. Something new. Something flat, and devoid of warmth.

It's as if she's become harder than her own flesh. Denser and heavier. As if she's compacted down into a form of mass that occupies space differently from the way she did before. The movement of her head through the medium of air seems like the movement of a statue's head; her body shifts with the slow weightiness of stone.

"I'll be with you in a minute," she says. The team's supposed to be going out for pizza. They're always running late; none of them apologize for it anymore. There's always more work than they can do in the hours there are.

"Don't rush," he says.

"I don't want to hold everybody up, just let me finish this last -- "

"Yeah you know I was kind of thinking about bailing on team night."

"Daniel."

"It's only gonna turn into karaoke night."

"If you're angling to hang out here so you can keep doing-- "

"'Bohemian Rhapsody' ... "

" -- that creepy sideways surveillance thing you think I haven't noticed -- "

"Teal'c and Vala ... all the parts ... "

" -- then I'd rather OD on greasy cheese and listen to Teal'c sing the entire Queen discography." She squints at him, then gives a sour-mouthed _it figures_ nod. "You already told them we weren't coming."

"I kind of did. Um, kind of an hour ago. Sorry." It's his silkiest, most unsorry 'sorry,' wrapped in toe-scuffing little-boy remorse; it helps hide that the way she said 'we' went right through him in a way it hasn't done in years. The weirdest little frisson of could-have-been coupledom, the pair of them bowing out of a group night out, the two of them pairing off. He hadn't meant it like that. In her voice he hears it like that. "But I'll buy you dinner," he adds, overbrightly.

"What is your _problem_, Daniel? You've been stealth-staring at me like a lovesick kid for days. Didn't we get over the crush thing like -- oh, I don't know, a _decade_ ago?"

"Eight years," he says, because it was in the second year that their mutual crushes settled into deeper friendship; the fifth year was the year they agreed to stop falling in love, and the eighth year was the last year that they were close and easy with each other. For a year and a half they've been more like familiar strangers; yet suddenly, now, he feels that little rush of _something_ again, that youthful zing of awareness that it's just the two of them in her lab, that he's practically just asked her on a date. It's silly, even ridiculous; he's here because something's been off about her since the mission and he doesn't think that pizza and singalongs with the gang are going to help him figure it out. And yet ...

"It's not that," he says, putting a lid on it and going for the relevant truth. "I want to know what happened on _Odyssey_. What you didn't put in your report."

She looks at him for a long time, and then shuts her machine down and gets up. "OK," she says. It's not agreeable acquiescence. It's not rolling up her sleeves to dive in. It's all business. All flat, stone-cold business. "Let's go."

&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;

He has some sense of how Teal'c courageously endures, and weaves his suffering into his strength; Teal'c's losses are the reinforcing strands threaded through the strapping tape that makes him nearly impossible to snap.

He has some sense of how Jack steadfastly denies the battle, incorporating his pain as an integral part of his world, backgrounding it while making it part of the fabric of the reality he occupies; his griefs suffuse his existence, are a defining characteristic of it, of him; if they could be plucked out, he would cease to exist in any form that he or anyone who'd known him would recognize.

He even has some sense of how he resists his own suffering, makes a crutch of that resistance. He rails against his pain, resents it, maintains an active adversarial relationship with it; it's the flame of rage he fans when he's too cold and broken to care anymore, it's the wall he pushes off from to get moving, the fence he leans on so that he won't collapse from stress and fatigue. Pain is his prop, his cane; it'll be his walker and his wheelchair if he lives to get old.

But he has no sense of what Sam does with hers.

They have dinner first, a little hole-in-the-wall Italian place with drip candles in old Mateus bottles and a meat-sauce recipe the proprietor's great-grandmother brought with her from the old country. They can't talk shop there, and they're both hungry, so mostly they eat, and confine conversation to movies they've seen, how Cassie's doing ... the standard defaults. Sam is prettier in candlelight than in ship's light, her eyes a darker blue. She gets sauce on her blouse, and without thinking he dips his napkin in his club soda and goes to dab at it, and she lifts her hands to shoo him off and then pauses, and their gazes meet. A soft, electric sparkle suffuses the air, a shared recognition, a thrill of limerance ... and then Sam gently takes the napkin away from him and blots the worst of the stain out and gives it back.

&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;

On this summer evening, the air is lush with greenness, the trees sleepy and leaf-laden. They walk through Cottonwood Creek Park at a slow amble, taking quiet pleasure in leisurely appreciation of park surroundings after all the wild wooded trails they hike at forced march. He's in no hurry, now, to get wherever they're going. But they're here for a reason, and she's gone very quiet, so as they come alongside the soccer fields, a few kids still kicking a ball around as the light dies, a couple of grownups walking off with stuffed gear bags hanging from their shoulders, he starts.

"Emerson was a good man." It's a gambit, and a guess. There was surveillance footage of the whole grisly scene on the bridge, but he didn't watch it; only Landry did, the IOA, probably Jack -- no one else on the team. Higher is still very, very ticked about the loss of _Prometheus_ and thirty-nine of her crew including Lionel Pendergast. Maybe Sam still feels the sting of that, still kicks herself for her part in it. He's never talked to her about it because they don't talk, anymore, and because he doesn't kick himself for what became of _Prometheus_ or Tegalus. It makes him angry -- deeply, abidingly angry -- but he believes in the choices he made and the actions he took. Maybe Sam's haunted by hindsight; it wouldn't be the first time. Or maybe she's haunted by some memory of Emerson, some look on his face as he went down. Something that said _Fuck this mortal-wound shit, you follow that order, Colonel_, or _Make this count for something_. Some final message between one military officer and another that she could never make good on.

Sam says, "I put five rounds into him."

"Five ... " He blinks, gives his head a shake. "Who?"

"Solek. Five rounds."

They hadn't been able to find Solek. Vala had beamed him out of the cargo hold where the rest of the crew were being held right before she beamed Anateo out into vacuum. They joked about him possibly having ended up in the sewage reservoir. It was a _Star Wars_ reference wrapped around the implication that he was a piece of shit. They didn't even know, then, that he was the one who'd fired on Emerson. They'd heard only one report before Borzin the chop-shop guy stopped the playback, and the audio recording didn't indicate who'd fired the shot. Emerson's body and the mission and autopsy records testified to the three shots fired after the killing shot, but Daniel never considered what that meant.

_How did you find him?_ and _What did you do with the body?_ are the first questions that come to his lips. Instead he says, "Who knows about this?"

"What difference does it make?" she snaps.

Carefully, but almost abstractedly -- his gaze is on the dark figures of the two coaches walking away across the playing field, silhouettes fattened by bulky equipment duffels -- he says, "It could make a lot of difference to your career."

He feels her stiffen. She's pissed. He's said the wrong thing, and he's sorry, genuinely sorry, this is important and it's important to him to make the noises that will help her even though he doesn't know what they are yet, but he's so close -- there's something trying to click, some connection straining to complete in his head --

"And that worries you, huh?" The phrasing is casual but the tone is of anger tightly managed. "What my superiors might make of my actions? Some judgment of vigilanteism handed down on review?"

"I think maybe it's been worrying you a bit."

"Well, it hasn't -- and could you _sound_ more patronizing? On emergency power-conservation settings, auto-surveillance shuts down shipwide except for the bridge and engine room. I hadn't brought it back up yet. There's no recording. So nobody _knows_."

"OK," he says slowly, treading through a minefield while his mind is juggling soccer balls, duffel bags, sports gear. "That's ... good?"

"Oh yeah," she says, and at least in the bitter sarcasm there's less anger and more Sam. "That makes all the difference, Daniel. That nobody knows I had the bastard at gunpoint and chose to fire instead of taking him prisoner. That nobody knows I fired five rounds, and it was the fifth one that killed him."

Sam has always kept up her master marksman rating. When she fires a weapon, her shots go where she intends them to. If she had Solek at gunpoint and the time to choose to fire and where, she was more than capable of making the first round the kill shot.

"I see," he says softly.

And he does, now.

He's got the sense of it. His archaeologist's mind has found the model, his cryptologist's mind the cipher; his anthropologist's mind has made it into parable, and he understands.

Sam _carries_ her pain.

The weight isn't in her, but on her.

It's actual baggage. A pack she found somewhere, or more likely constructed for herself, maybe when she was a kid, and started putting the griefs in, to keep her hands free to tinker, to write equations, to use computers, to fight, to climb trees, to climb ladders. She hasn't incorporated them into her world, she hasn't internalized or reinforced herself with them, she hasn't made them into tools. She's just put them into that pack, one by one, stuffing it fuller and fuller; her recovery time is the time it takes her to sling off the pack, open it up, suffer the pain of looking at all the other griefs, even shifting them around a little to accommodate the new addition, make the packing as efficient as possible ... and then turn, and crouch down, and put her arms through the straps, and stand up, with the pack slung back on. He remembers it now: the look of grim, jaw-clenched determination the last time he saw her do this.

It was at Emerson's memorial, and it was a triple whammy. The weight of his loss, the weight of her part in it, and the weight of the act she committed in its wake. Not guilt, not remorse; she's made clear that what she did, she did deliberately, she's told him that she's not afraid of official consequences, and she doesn't need to tell him that she's not sorry and she'd do it again. But the act carried weight. It has added to her burden.

If she keeps packing all that pain, one of these times she's going to burst a blood vessel, get a hernia, have an aneurysm, snap a hamstring. One of these days, the pack is going to be stronger than she is, and she's what's going to split open when she settles it back on her shoulders and tries to stand. Or it'll take her down, as out of nowhere, right in the middle of a trail. Heart attack, exhaustion; the metaphor won't matter anymore. Maybe it's a sledge, not a pack, and she'll drop in the traces.

"I'm not looking for absolution," she says, low and harsh. "I didn't ask you to come out here. I didn't start this."

He nods, and then says softly, "I wanted to know. I want to know."

And that's what it takes, to get her to tell him. Because nobody can carry anybody else's suffering for them. Nobody can help him prop up his wall of pain, nobody can hug Teal'c tight enough to ease the cutting press of his strapping, nobody can tear Jack's griefs from Jack without tearing him apart. Whatever Mitchell and Vala do with theirs, no one can do it for them, not even to ease the burden for one hour. But that doesn't mean that suffering can't be shared. That doesn't mean that suffering can't be eased.

That doesn't mean that it isn't possible to transmute what's in that pack into a lighter element.

Knowing does make all the difference. Being willing to ask, being willing to listen. Being willing to _know_.

He's internalized _her_. She's become part of him -- her voice, her presence, even the way she thinks; like a part of his body and one of the mechanisms of his thought processes. Because of that, he doesn't think about her anymore. He forgets her, the way he forgets his own body. He forgets Teal'c too. They're just _there_, enmeshed into the fabric of his existence. He's done with them what Jack's done with his own damage, what Teal'c's done with his. It's wrong. They're not _damage_. They're precious to him. She's precious to him.

He takes Sam and Teal'c for granted now in a way he's nowhere near with Mitchell and Vala, even after eighteen months. They're still new; they're not part of him. He remembers when Sam was new, when they were new to each other. Suddenly, sweetly, painfully, he remembers the Sam he fell in love with. The tough-talking airman with so much to prove, the veteran Desert Storm pilot with no more ground-ops experience than he had, just as awkward and silly-looking in the big helmet and the bulky gear. A couple of kids, the two of them, staring in rapt wonder at the universe.

He's known her for so long that he's forgotten how important knowing her is.

"I was down on deck twelve," she says. "I went there to access the data core manually to force a restore of the hyperdrive's last working configuration. He was there hiding. He took a shot at me. He missed. I don't know why. Maybe some injury related to the intra-ship beaming. I took cover, opened an access panel, created a short in a damaged section of bulkhead next to him, a small explosion. It stunned him and knocked the weapon loose. I picked it up. It was the same weapon he killed Emerson with. Did you see what happened on the bridge?"

"I didn't watch the recording."

"I should rephrase. Do you know what happened on the bridge."

"I know there were four entry wounds."

"Solek shot Emerson through the heart. He was dead when he hit the deck. Solek stood over him and fired another round into him. Then he fired two more. Emerson was dead and the son of a bitch just had to keep firing."

"So you did too."

"Yes. But it was calculated. A calculated decision, and a calculated count. The first shot was to incapacitate because he was coming around. The next three were payback. The last was to end it."

"You beamed out the remains?"

"No. That would have gone into the ship's transport log, and I couldn't have done it from that location anyway. I zatted them. Blood and all. Along with the weapon, and the slug that missed me. I reported the explosion in the bulkhead because it registered on the ship's internal sensors. If any of the repair personnel were qualified to differentiate the scoring left by a bullet from the scoring of small debris impact, they haven't reported their suspicions."

He nods. They've looped around the soccer fields, forgoing the golf course, and they're headed back towards the playground and the softball diamonds. His apartment's walking distance from here, but their cars are in the park's lot.

"So now you know," she says.

"Now I know," he says.

"Feel better now?"

"My curiosity is satisfied, yes," he says. "But that's not the right question."

She doesn't speak for a long time. His phrasing and delivery were too formal, almost pedantic, and it's possible she's taken insult; but it was the first thing he's said that wasn't calculated to be the right thing to say or what she needed to hear, and it's the way he talks. It makes him a jerk, sometimes, but at least an honest jerk, those times. He doesn't say anything else.

They cut across from the playground to the lot. Their cars are parked side by side, her vintage Volvo and his brand-new Wrangler Unlimited. Her keys jingle as she pulls them from her pocket; his Jeep chirps as he presses the remote to unlock it.

She turns to him. Looks at him, really looks at him for the first time since he stood in the doorway of her lab. Her head tilts, and she winces a little, a sustained, sad little wince, as though she's sorry for him, or for something she hasn't done yet. Then her chin gives a twist to the side, and he understands that it's a query.

He doesn't open his arms. He opens his hands. It could be a gesture of helplessness or inability to understand. But it's not, and she steps up to him, against him. Her arms stretch past his neck, out straight, not closing. Her keys dangle swinging from her fingers. Her chin drops into the hollow of his neck, and she hangs on him, the way one prizefighter hangs on another to steal a few breaths of rest.

"Yes," she says, to the question he believes she should have asked. Her voice is muffled in his collar, but the words come through clearly, and her breath is warm on his skin. "I do. Because now someone else knows. Because now you know."

He nods against her head, the softness of her hair against his face. He puts his arms around her, and he can feel her melt.

&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;&gt;

The one time they made love, in the fifth year, it was warm and slow and sweet and lasted all night, and in a golden spill of morning sunshine she pressed tight against his side, all long lithe limbs and delicious curves and smooth bare skin, and said, "We can't do this for comfort again. We have to find another way to be this for each other." He turned, wrapped his arms around her, pressed his face into the hollow behind her jaw, kissed her throat. "I know," he said; and they did. They found other ways to be each other's solace and consolation. For a while, they found other ways to touch, other ways to be close. And then they forgot them, or let them go.

Now, in the blue shadows and soft summer breeze and leaf murmur, she draws back from him, and drops her arms, and smiles. She looks like Sam again, a miraculous transformation, and he thinks that maybe now it doesn't have to be for comfort. He thinks that maybe now it can be for love.

He smiles back purely because the sight of her makes him smile. He keys the remote again to re-lock his Jeep. He offers his arm instead of his hand because an embrace is fine but they can't ever be seen holding hands, and he's never been able to lead her anywhere by the hand anyway. She pivots to loop an arm through his, and locks tight against his side as though she's always belonged there, a perfect fit.

They walk the few blocks briskly through the fall of night, her hard-boned, capable fingers a firm squeeze around his biceps, her pale goldenness a familiar beauty he doesn't have to look at to be sure of, and their steps are light.


End file.
